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Friday, September 21, 2012

A Guest Post by Literary Agent, Michael Larsen

Creating a Literary Ecosystem: The 7 Essential Elements of a Fulfilling Writing Career

Gaia, the Earth, is an ecosystem—a unique, miraculous, self-sustaining combination of elements that evolved out of each other. You can create a literary ecosystem: a balanced, organic, evolving, sustainable, inter-dependent, international, environmentally sensitive community.
Your system will be unified by passion, interest, service, connection, and commerce. The seven circular elements of your literary ecosystem will be:

• Passion---your excitement for creating and communicating your work

• Products and services---as much scalable, first-rate work in your niche as you can generate in different forms and lengths that you re-purpose in other media

• Pre-promotion---test-marketing your work in as many ways as you can

• People---win-win relationships with engaged, committed, growing communities you serve who want to help you, because they know, like, and trust you

• Platform---your continuing visibility, online and off, with your communities and potential buyers about your work

• Promotion---using your passion and platform for sharing the value of work to serve your communities

• Profit---what you need to achieve your personal and professional goals and maintain the system

The importance of each element will vary, depending on what you write. Promotion will be more important for a book than a blog post.

Your ecosystem has to keep learning from and contributing to your communities, the hyper-connected human family, and the planet. Your system will continue to build synergy as long as you sustain it by enriching its soil with content and communication.
Make cultivating your ecosystem a lifelong quest. You will accomplish more than you can imagine.

I like the idea of thinking about the elements of our careers as ecosystems. We tend to neglect certain things, either because we haven't learned how to do them or don't like to do them, but that limits our overall careers from flourishing and thriving. It seems it might be difficult to balance all seven of these equally, but there might be overlap between them, or they might sustain each other.

Thank you Mr. Larsen, for this interesting analogy. I love this idea - my mind is already turning in various directions. I like too, how it can be adjusted for different types of writing. Thanks to you too, Jennifer for hosting and providing the introduction.

Winner...

Winner...

About Me

Professional, veteran freelance writer, columnist, Pro Blogger, and "Ghost" writer with about 700 publishing credits, reflecting an array of topics, in multiple genres. My work has appeared in popular, award-winning sites and national magazines, for over a decade.
I'm the former Senior Editor of Mahogany Magazine.
I also serve on the Board of Directors of C.W.A.